Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog

hollywood is, as i might have mentioned a few hundred times, grimy.
it’s a global tourist destination, and it’s been immortalized (well, by human standards) a few million times in movies and books and songs and art and photography.
it would be hard to find anyone alive who hasn’t heard of hollywood, at least in some capacity.
which makes the griminess of hollywood even more baffling, as most global tourist destinations are, generally, kept in pretty good shape.
i’m not complaining, as i like the griminess of hollywood.
i like that it’s kind of cheap and run down and tarnished and sketchy.
and architecturally hollywood is like architecture in a vit-a-mix.
every architectural form from the last 100 years is represented somewhere and somehow and in some state of maintenance or disrepair.
there are some great buildings in hollywood, and there are some, uh, less great buildings in hollywood.
i love the less great buildings for their run-down mundanity, but i also love some of the pristine and beautiful old buildings sandwiched
in between the nail salons and bail bondsmen and pawn shops and greasy thai food restaurants.
today’s building is one of the beautiful old buildings, and i know nothing about it.
i looked for a sign. or a plaque. or something indicating either what it is, what it was, when it was built, or what it was ever used for.
and, in my ignorance, i found nothing.
so it’s a fairly tall, beautiful, perfect cipher.
in a perfect world it would be a headquarters for 1920’s super heroes, battling coarse criminals in giant metal cars.
or it would be a strange observatory-transmitter, sending reports on humankind back to a home planet busy preparing for a benign
invasion wherein we’d be saved from ourselves.
or, more likely, a time-share between the two.
at least that’s what i’ve decided.
thanks,
-moby